Firebird

by Michael Asher

Monod wiped blood off his knuckles. ‘You do a damn good impersonation,’ he said.

  I picked up a clean handkerchief from the laundry he’d scattered over the floor. ‘Just hold this over it.’

  He covered the wound carefully, his eyes never leaving my face. ‘You’re a cop,’ he said, ‘and the cops are mixed up in this. You’re all in on it — the SID, the uniforms, the FBI — even the CIA .’

  I sighed. We were at an impasse, I could see that. Monod could have been involved in Ibram’s murder, but my instinct told me otherwise. I could have forced the information out of him, but that might have ended up being very messy and even counterproductive. He thought I was lying, and to get him to tell me of his own volition I’d have to prove I wasn’t.

  ‘I’ll tell you what, Monod,’ I said, slowly, ‘I think we have a bunch of things to talk about, things that would be of mutual benefit. I need to know about the map and Firebird.’

  He watched me silently, biding his time. ‘I’m not going to make you talk,’ I said, ‘I want you to talk to me of your own free will. I’m ready to stick my neck out to show you I’m on the level. I’m letting you go.’

  His eyes were heavy with disbelief, and I knew he scented a trap. ‘What for?’ he asked.

  ‘To show you I’m telling the truth. Think it over and we’ll meet up in a couple of days. Whatever you think, I’m not one of them.’

  ‘It’s a set up.’

  ‘Consider it,’ I said, ‘it’ll take you about three minutes to get into the street from here, and not even Clark Kent could get a hit team together that fast. It’s night and the moment you get out there, I’ve lost you. Like I say, I know I’m sticking my neck out and I might never see you again. But if I’m really a state assassin like you’re suggesting, I could easily pop you right here and no one’d say a dickybird.’

  ‘You want information.’

  ‘Sure I do. I want to know what the map is, and what Firebird is, but if I was what you say I am I’d know already. And believe me, if it was something else I wanted I could call the persuaders in and have your balls grilled right now. Why would I take the trouble of letting you go just to set you up?’

  I could see from his eyes that he was wavering. It might be a trick, he was thinking, but even if it was, what did he have to lose? If he stayed here there was a good chance I’d rub him out anyway. And there might be the ghost of a chance I was telling the truth. I let the Beretta drop all the way to my side and Monod watched it. He wanted to believe me, but like all the hardest things in life it required a leap of faith. As Sanusi said, faith is what counts. The difficult part would be getting from the chair to the door. At last he stood up shakily, never taking his eyes off the Beretta. I handed him a blank card with Hammoudi’s number on it.

  ‘I’m Sammy Rashid,’ I said. ‘When you’re ready, ring this number and give your instructions to whoever answers. Whatever you think, this is not a set up.’ I picked up his veil. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘and you’re going to need this.’

  He took the veil and grinned weakly, then turned and marched to the door. He closed it behind him gently, and the last thing I heard was the slap of his tamut takhalli on the stairs.

  20

  It was only after Monod had left that I remembered Anton Halaby. I had an appointment to meet him tonight at the Scorpion Club, and I knew he would be there. Halaby was the best police informant in the business — not a ten dollar snitch but a retired intelligence agent who had been around state secrets most of his life. If he hadn’t been caught with his hand in the till a few years back, he might still have been a highly paid consultant rather than being obliged to do spadework for the likes of Hammoudi and me. He’d only let me down once — when I’d asked him to put a trace on my father, Desmond Redfield. He’d told me what I already knew — that he’d disappeared without trace. ‘Which is passing strange,’ he’d commented ominously, ‘feels like someone wanted to obliterate his name from the face of the earth.’

  I was dog tired. The encounters with the ghoul and Monod had drained me of energy and the last thing I wanted was to go out. But Hammoudi had set Halaby a couple of questions and I knew he’d have the answers. I looked at my bed, now lying scattered in bits all over the bedroom floor. It didn’t look inviting. Damn bloody Monod, I thought. I mean, I’d have expected a guy like him to have been more methodical. I walked round the flat picking up books and pictures, righting furniture, then I gave up. It was an exercise in futility. Instead I dragged myself to the shower, bathed the bump on my head and lathered myself, letting the hot water relax my muscles. Then I went out on to my balcony, breathed in the coolness of the air and listened to the sounds of the night. My apartment was on the top storey of a waterfront block, an end flat so that my balcony curved round Art Deco style to give an interesting field of view. The Nile here was only about thirty metres wide so you could clearly see and hear the constant stream of motor vehicles grinding and roaring along the Corniche. Almost directly opposite my flat was the great buttress wall of the Roman viaduct, but that was invisible tonight. To my right, though, I could make out necklaces of light around the Coptic churches of Old Cairo — St Sergius, the Hanging Church, St Barbasa — and the mosque of ‘Amr Ibn al-Aas — probably the oldest mosque in Africa. These sites were actually built on top of the ruins of an ancient fortress called Babylon, which was probably constructed in pharaonic times by Babylonian prisoners of war.

  The story went that Babylon was the entrance to a vast network of subterranean tunnels and catacombs which spanned the whole city, from Old Cairo to Heliopolis and Giza. It was a labyrinth whose origin was supposed to go back to the time of the Ra Brotherhood, and whose secret entrances were guarded by giant serpents. I thought about the ghoul, and the door, only blocks from here, that opened into a staircase down which he’d disappeared. I fingered the bruise on my forehead. Right before someone or something had clubbed me, I’d thought I’d spotted a crude graffito of the ibis-headed god Thoth down there — a figure folded in the coils of a giant snake. Thoth was the ancient Egyptian god of magic, who was supposed to have come from afar and introduced mathematics, science, writing, astrology, medicine, music and engineering to the Nile Valley. He was credited with having created the ancient Egyptian priesthood, or its forerunner, the mysterious organization known as the Shemsu-Hor. Throughout history there had been legends about the Books of Thoth, which were a repository of all the secret wisdom accumulated by the Brotherhood over the millennia. Eighteen months ago, Ibram had been searching for an undiscovered chamber inside the Great Pyramid. ‘If I remember rightly,’ Andropov had said, ‘it was called the Chamber of Thoth.’ Maybe Ibram had been looking for the Books of Thoth — the greatest prize in the history of Egyptology. Maybe that’s what the map was about.

  ‘Shit!’ I shouted to the walls, bringing my fist down hard on the table, ‘Monod knew all the answers and I fucking let him go!’

  21

  The Ramadan crowds were out when I emerged from my block and I could hardly believe these were the same streets where I’d chased the creature only hours before. Still, I felt somehow conspicuous and vulnerable and I dodged through the shadows along the riverbank as niftily as my exhausted state would allow. Standing under a streetlamp at the corner of my block were two men in ankle length black Barbour coats with flaps at the shoulders. They wore dark hats tilted over eyes that were swathed in shadow, the lower parts of their faces showing vampire-pale like slices of the waning moon. I put some distance between myself and them and hailed a black and white taxi. The driver was a morose man whose shifty eyes flickered over me constantly in the mirror as if he suspected I might run off without paying.

  The area around the Scorpion was semi-derelict — frontier territory, with fires in steel braziers and hunched figures with hostile eyes. The cheery crowd of revellers at the door came like an oasis in the desert. I pushed my way through them and nodded to Bakhit, the doorman.

  The big Turk laid a pudgy hand on my arm and led me aside into
an alcove.

  ‘Had some guys here tonight asking for you,’ he said. ‘Pale guys — skin like feta cheese — wearing long black trench coats and black hats. Looked like refugees from an undertaker’s parlour.’

  ‘Who were they?’ I asked.

  ‘Said they were cops,’ he said, ‘but they didn’t look like any cops I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘Funny,’ I said, ‘that’s just what they say about me.’ Bakhit gave me a sliver of a grin. ‘Watch your step, they could still be around.’

  I thanked him and shuffled painfully down the steps. The place was more crowded than it had been the night before, or maybe I just arrived later. There was no snake—charmer tonight, and I searched in vain for escaped cobras under the tables. I bought a bottle of Stella beer from one of the animated shirts behind the bar, and stalked off in search of Halaby. The club was full of deafening music — there was a pop singer on stage, a foreign woman with Mohican hair dyed blue, paperclips in her ears, safety pins in her nose, studs in her lips, and a tiny gold chain strung from earlobe to nostril. She was stubby and muscular with leather trousers, a fishnet blouse, ghastly red lipstick and cowboy boots that gave her the look of a streetwalker moonlighting. She sang with a rock band — long haired, emaciated men with vacant faces — and her voice was like a mangle. I grimaced, longing for Nadia, but the clientele seemed to be enjoying it, whooping up on the dance floor, so that I had to push through them. A cute looking woman with a blonde fringe and a sequinned dress, smoking a cigarette, looked me up and down — not without interest, I thought. I made a mental note, and moved on, scrunching up my face against the decibels. I was relieved to find Halaby sitting at a table in the darkest of the alcoves, near the bathroom, and as far as it was physically possible to get from the raucous performer.

  In spite of his Western dress, Halaby looked like some ancient tribal chief, a heavy man with a broad inscrutable face, his eye sockets so sandbagged with drinking that he could almost have been an Eskimo. His hair was all there but it was white and bristly and he wore an expensive well cut suit, twenty years old, which hadn’t been to the menders or the cleaners in many a moon. He didn’t get up as I approached, in fact he showed no sign of having recognized me at all until I sat down in front of him with my beer, and then he glanced at me as if I’d been sitting there all along. He poured himself an araq from a bottle on the table.

  ‘Have a real drink,’ he said. He spoke Arabic like an aristocrat, with almost no Cairene accent, and his voice sounded as though he had a mouthful of treacle. Ironically, he always said that he came from a long line of gypsies — folk who wandered up and down the Nile telling fortunes, grinding knives and mending pans.

  I sniffed the araq and was nauseated by the smell of aniseed. ‘No thanks,’ I said, ‘I’m sticking to beer.’

  Halaby gulped down araq. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ he said. ‘After all, Egypt has always been a beer swilling culture. Beer has been brewed in this country for thousands of years. Think of that! There was no wine here till Akhnaton planted grapes and that’s when everything started to go bad. If we’d stuck to beer, we’d probably still have been top dogs, but once wine appeared everything started to get soft and nancified!’

  I chuckled, and Halaby leaned over towards me confidentially. ‘I don’t like it,’ he whispered. ‘There are goons following me.’

  ‘Who?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Not the usual watchers. Creeps in black coats and hats — like a uniform. Like they want you to know they’re there.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ I said, ‘I’ve got the same problem.’

  I drank some beer, and watched the couples on the dancefloor. The tempo of the music had changed abruptly — now it was soft and smoochy and the dancers were moving sensuously, coiling around each other’s bodies. A glittering light turned circles above the dancefloor like an immense revolving eye. There were smells of tobacco smoke and incense, and the atmosphere had started to become seductive. I saw the attractive sequinned woman dancing with a man and felt a pang of regret for missed opportunities. I tried to picture Daisy but the image was crushed by an overwhelming sense of guilt over Fawzi’s death. As if reading my thoughts, Halaby said: ‘Fawzi’s dead then?’

  ‘My God. The news travels quick,’ I said.

  ‘The dead travel quick, as they say,’ he said, ‘or something like that. Isn’t it Goethe? That bloody medical facility the Yanks have is lethal. A place where many go in but few come out except in body bags. They missed Fawzi the first time round but I knew they’d get him in the end.’

  I dragged my gaze away from the smooching dancers and peered at him candidly. ‘They said it was food poisoning,’ I said. ‘Do you know something I don’t?’

  ‘I know plenty you don’t. That’s why you pay me. I remember Fawzi when he was a snotty-nosed street urchin begging for scraps. Food poisoning? I doubt it.’ He tapped his nose with his finger and took a gulp of araq. He drank it neat, I noticed. ‘I’ve been in this game a long time,’ he said, ‘ever since the British were here. Learned the spook trade from the Brits — they were the masters long before the CIA was ever heard of.’

  ‘So?’ I said, not seeing where this was leading.

  ‘So, I’ve seen plenty of hit jobs in my time. The Ibram hit looked like a professional operation, but then they screwed up by leaving Fawzi alive. They had to redress that somehow.’

  ‘You mean Fawzi was got at? In a US medical facility guarded by marines and TV cameras?’ I stared at him, and he gulped again. The action reminded me of a very large fish.

  ‘Halaby knows,’ he said, almost gloating.

  ‘It’ll all come out at the autopsy anyway,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not. Remember the Cranwell case a few years back? Body identified and sent off in an ambulance, but never reached the morgue?’

  I shifted uncomfortably and tried to keep my face dead pan. ‘You think this is connected?’

  Halaby scratched his chin and narrowed the puffy eyes. ‘I didn’t say that,’ he said, ‘but when you’ve been in the business as long as me, you can feel when something big’s going down. It’s like a sixth sense. Faces shut up, telephones engaged, hushed voices, people acting out of character — small things like that.’

  ‘And now the men in black.’

  ‘Yes, the watchers. I don’t like it, Sammy. I don’t like it at all.’

  He took a giant cigar out of his inside pocket and bit the end off. It looked like a real Havana, I thought. I watched as he lit it with a well-worn silver lighter. No matter how down-at-heel, guys like Halaby always had money for smokes and drink. He puffed out a circlet of cigar smoke and watched me pensively, like a ruminating toad. ‘I mean, why would the Militants take out a guy like Ibram?’ he said. ‘He wasn’t even a Yank — not really. If you want to make a statement, plant a bloody bomb in a US embassy like they did in Nairobi in ‘ninety eight. And then why Fawzi? No, there’s got to be something more to it than that.’

  I deliberately changed the subject. ‘You get any of the stuff Hammoudi asked for?’

  He drew himself up slightly and puffed on the cigar, sucking in his cheeks. Then he blew out a series of rings, ignoring my question and regarding me with faint disdain, as though it had been vulgar of me to remind him of work. I knew he was stalling, spinning it out as long as possible. He might have been laying on the gravity just to up the fee, but I suspected that it was really because he had something interesting to tell me and wanted to make it as dramatic as possible. Halaby had a prodigious memory for detail, and he probably knew more political secrets than any other Egyptian alive. If he hadn’t got himself mixed up with the Shadowmen and started taking rake offs to keep his trap shut he’d have retired a national hero.

  At first Hammoudi had suspected Halaby was the stoolie who’d tipped the Shadowmen off the day we’d staked out the Gallery — the day I’d ended up as a human shield for Hammoudi and got a round in my lung for it. But Hammoudi had interrogated him personal
ly and had been satisfied it was someone else. We knew about Halaby’s involvement of course, and he’d been lucky to escape prison, but I suppose in the end he knew too much about too many people, and the top brass wouldn’t go for it. His silence was his ticket to staying out of jail, but who knew when someone might decide he had to be silenced for all time. No wonder he drank, I thought. I wouldn’t have wanted to be in his position for a million pounds. But then I don’t suppose he’d have wanted to be in mine.

  He looked at me with his big toad eyes and assumed a dignified expression. ‘Let’s get something straight,’ he said, ‘I don’t do it for the money, you know. I do it because it interests me.’

  I knew I’d been too peremptory. With people like Halaby you had to work your way round to things slowly in old Arab style, otherwise the prickles came up. I guess I was just too tired to play the game. ‘Of course, Anton,’ I said, soothingly, ‘I know that. Everybody does. You’ve got enough stashed away from your...well, your arrangements, to last you for good. And I know, you only dabbled a bit because they didn’t pay you enough. They never paid you anything like what you were worth.’

  He nodded happily. We both knew it was a lie, but a necessary fiction I indulged in to allow him to keep his face. I was still anxious to get to the nitty-gritty, though. He took a great drag of smoke from his cigar and let it out. ‘First, Monod,’ he said.

  I nodded. I wasn’t going to let on that I’d actually met Monod. Halaby didn’t need to know, and if he knew it would have spoiled his performance anyway.

  ‘The guy’s Swiss,’ Halaby said, ‘but spent years in Egypt. He’s an engineer by training and has worked on dams and irrigation projects all over Africa and the Middle East. Married to an Egyptian woman of an old family, and his wife and kids live in Geneva. Speaks Arabic like a native. Seems he’s most well known in Egypt for his theory about the pyramids, though. He’s written a lot of stuff about it.’